


simple song

by elebuu



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: 5.0 spoilers, Character Study, F/M, Past Lives, hiraeth, past life romance, referenced song, the ladder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-11
Updated: 2019-08-11
Packaged: 2020-08-18 21:22:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20198374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elebuu/pseuds/elebuu
Summary: Through a glass darkly, he wonders if he's going mad.Who is she.





	simple song

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rahelawriter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rahelawriter/gifts).

_ ~~~ _

Frolicking. 

The hero, near to the brim with corrupted brightness, dawn before nightless day of her final challenge, was frolicking amid the new growth of flowers over the moor. 

Emet-Selch heaved a sigh that sank him into the ruff of his coat, more rag-and-bone than man. Had he made a blunder in his judgment after all? After his own protestations that he and his brethren were only getting older, and no wiser? But, then. 

If he kept his eyes on her for even half the instant it took to blink, there was no question. It beggared belief in every way; but there it was, perfectly ensconced in a perfect disguise:  _ imperfection _ . ‘Twas as if the Mothercrystal Herself had deigned to hide her from him, silencing all but the utterly unmistakable signatures. 

What misfortune it was that he’d sat busy growing wizened and sickly atop the self-aggrandised iron splendor of Garlemald, while to the west,  _ she  _ had wandered out of the deep gloaming; a single treasure amidst the waves of broken glass and detritus and the sands he had wasted tens of men’s lifetimes trying to sieve for pieces of people he knew. 

Still.

He breezed himself out of one shadow and into another, the age-crusted and crooked face of a wall of Light-stained rock. This way he was closer. He slumped against the crag in a stance that held all the leisurely parasitism of ivy slowly eclipsing the life of the tree it embraced. He faded into the sliver of dark granted him by a rocky harelip of the hillock face, and tried--again, again--to see the hero of the era  _ in vivo _ . 

Her shock of russet hair was the first thing that threw off his impressions. Rahela--W’rahela, on paper, he suspected, although whether the caustic little magus was much beholden to paper decrees, he was doubtful. He would have been much more easily mistaken had she worn it long over her shoulders. Waves and waves of it, copper and crimson and broken earth. Although then, he supposed, frowning, he would have noticed the ears sooner. 

Miqo’te were an invention Emet-Selch confessed to himself was surprisingly novel, as humanity-adrift was concerned. He wondered grimly in whose panic at the moment of Sundering the  _ felid  _ concept and that of  _ Humanity  _ had crossed over. They were an old people among the clades of ‘Spoken’. Very old. 

Rahela’s right ear twitched, catching something on the wind. He suppressed a noise that went with the scowl he felt twisting his mouth around. He would not find himself terribly taken aback to learn that over her fragments and their bitterly lived mortalities, she had picked up an ambient sense for hearing another’s thoughts across the breath of the wind. It would be a fitting gift. A fitting return. 

But Rahela was not P--

He could not allow his mind to speak her name. Nor his own. Every few tangles of centuries he entertained the notion of ending the lie; that it would be easier to bear if he cast their names into mud and into fog, if he covered his mouth in his sleep; if he abandoned the thought of the mask as an icon and forced it instead to take the meaning of a disguise. It was only every few centuries or so. But his fear--running deep enough that he thought it would break his ankle as he fled from it--was that as soon as he spoke it, especially  _ her name _ , the sound and the feel and the warmth and the whisper of it would fashion themselves into the weapon that slew him. And if he was slain, he would  _ surely  _ never be able to keep his promise. 

And so again he stuffed her name into the glovebox, into the gutter. Whatever he wondered, he dared hope only that the waiting to wait would soon be over.

_ If _ Rahela could contain it. If what he was seeing was her strength, her ancestor-ewer of the soul, and if it would not kill the mortal vessel to swallow the sea of corruption. 

The two of them got along hideously, he thought, as her ear shifted back to rest and she knelt in the carpeting bloom. They were probably weeds--stubborn things, beautiful because they were alive and ugly because of what they had to do to be there. But all Rahela saw were flowers. Stems, sepals, petals, and downy clouds of seeds, and with her hands she thanked them for living. As so few things did in this world that was meant from its first act of sedition to die. 

He waited another few moments before he let the dry death-rattle his laughter had become out of his nose and his teeth. It was quite simply funny. The instant he entered her locus of awareness, she was a hostile core reactor, a central gear hot with hate for him--some of it  _ exquisitely  _ specifically for him. He supposed in her mind it was the whole… oh…  _ founding  _ of one more empire joyously eager for murder; just one of a handful of his careful rodent farms, one more footnote in his ledger of sins. She lost her temper with him at the drop of a gesture with his fingers at just the wrong angle--tail fire-bright and tall, hair standing on end with predatory rage. He bore it with one of the oily smiles he had so well practiced, but alone with his thoughts as he was at such times as now, it disturbed him. It was hardly a crime against his heart for a mortal--a ghost of someone who  _ should  _ have been, and wasn’t, and  _ couldn’t _ , not until the work was finally over--to despise him. 

But she walked around this world and others besides, wrecking his machinery, his perfect and minimal designs, with all the absentminded fervor of a distracted weanling--with flashes and echoes of  _ her  _ in her form as she did so. He would be offended, even enraged, save that something inside him invariably softened at the sight of pain in her vertical-pupil eyes. What was she?

What had personhood become in these several eras he had spent believing that  _ people  _ had not existed since he watched them rupture at the seams under Hydaelyn’s  _ radiant  _ love? 

All of it threatened worse than his composure at any given moment. Yet he could not whole-heartedly lose his temper with Rahela in return. There was  _ creative  _ flame in her, and it moved him. Though she wielded thaumaturgy and the clandestine letters sent between man and voidsent with colourful wrath, with the characteristic  _ righteous fury  _ of those souls who would be remembered as heroes, the chaos of fires erupting from the aura of her living aether was deeply dyed in transformativity. 

The phase change of a death at her hands sent a shiver of fractured emotions through him. Flame and freezing and storm cloud collision, and once these basic ingredients, the ones he himself had learned to grasp as a child, were so coalesced, the vast emptying of all of herself into a single  _ flare  _ of burning victory. That destruction alone should still hold some of the music of their creation was sorrow and irony to him as much as it was art. 

And by the ancients, it was art. 

And it was still not theirs. Still not  _ hers _ in their once-age of deathless joy. He had not realised until now, as it gathered the heat of his body, the press of the deep metal arrows into his head. He ached. 

He ached, and Rahela sank into the forest of moss and petals. 

What passed through the gates of the mind in one who bore sacrifice not unlike his own, and still lived to love even the  _ scraps _ of blooms that could have been--Emet-Selch knew not whether to be awed or to vomit. 

She was unaware of him still, examining a few of the blue-tinged and hairy blossoms on the hillside, a glimpse of her attentive eyes behind the obscuring glass of her spectacles affording him a look at their colour. That much was the same; utterly and exactly the same, and it was as a riddle that her vertical pupils pinned and waxed and waned where they should, they  _ should  _ have been steady. But were he able to see in only colour, he would have found their essences inextricable. Rahela had the same luminosity as-- 

As her. Emet-Selch wanted to speak her name; almost wanted to try it on her, just to see if… ? But the outcome would change nothing. He bid Rahela drink from his bitter glass, drinking until she could take no more of the time-dilated and divinity-rotten aether of the Lightwardens; falling one by one like cups at a soldier’s game, only no one was laughing, no one was drunk, and no one was happy. 

At least as a soldier his role was straightforward and true to form. 

But he was not a soldier now, and he could not win this battle or any of the others that remained queued like careful board pieces poised to clatter one another down, by acts of brute strength. Rahela was his sword, and he could not decide which fate would be for the better. To emerge, bright-faced, the trickle of poison she could not afford to spit running down the far corner of her taunting smile; or to succumb, the empty goblet crashing with a hollow lament as she drank and could drink no more, and the Light within ate all of  _ her  _ sins, too. 

One route gained him a monster; the perfect harbinger of an apocalypse that had nearly slipped through his careful fingers. 

The other gained--mayhap even  _ regained _ him--a partner. 

For the moment, he was ill at ease and content to be so as ages-old patience and liminal anxious energy shivered and danced on the same taut rope in his brain. 

Against all sense of celerity or wisdom, the hero stretched and then nestled into the gnarled and weedy terrain, her pillow a tuft of butterfly-grass with no chance of its evolution-kissed attendees to return. 

Against all of his own sense and tactical pragmatism, the Ascian shifted in his pose when Rahela’s fidgeting slowed and finally ceased. She was getting her nightless night’s sleep before the last warden would stand in front of her, and it was here in the heat death of eternal daylight, atop flowers that would soon be extinct if all things went as planned. 

He sighed. 

Springtime walked into his life with a wilderness of black magic and the masque of a god’s idea of a cat; and she had arrived just in time for the last winter on this earth. 

Hades stepped in half-shade, his boots leaving no imprint on the wiry moor grass, over to where she lay asleep--the barest  _ swish  _ of her tail her only somnolent movement. Her hair was too short to braid as-- _ she _ \--so loved him to do. Loose, genetic braids like the proud crests of the tallest buildings in Amaurot. “ _ It is  _ ** _our_ ** _ history,  _ ** _our_ ** _ story _ ”, he had tried to tell her, and to see the eyes that should have widened with revelation remain as inert as though they belonged to a doll, was a feeling for which he had no description. 

The hardy little blossoms by her head, on the other hand--their fibrous stalks and distances from peak to petal were perfect for a little childhood trick he had learned. He raised his hand to do it the easy way-- _ Presto, P-! A magician never reveals his secrets! _ \--before venturing that the sudden snap might jolt the dozing hero awake, and what would he do, then? What insult would suffice to explain why he knelt close enough for touch? 

So he was resigned, again as too many times before, to do the kindness  _ their  _ way. 

He wove only three or four of the pinkest and purplest specimens through the exposed side of Rahela’s hair, working swiftly with his long and agile fingers in movements that were nearly liquid in their soundless ministration. Not so much as the edge of a glove reached the skin of her cheek, striated by her lineage. When it was done, he slowly leaned back and reviewed his handiwork. 

Her short and wandering locks would never hold the deep spring weight he carried in his memories, away where they could not pluck open the sutures of time and duty.

Still. 

He supposed it was because he, too, was weary, no matter how much he slept; but it crossed his mind to beg an impossible question, ere his expectations dashed themselves upon the rocks behind him. 

_ Her  _ name left his mouth, the form of a sound and a Concept that flowed from every plane of his lips. 

Rahela didn’t so much as twitch. Not once, not even from her fantastical, felid ears.

Emet-Selch stood and exhaled like a man waking up from a drowning, and stalked away with more on his mind than had sat there before. When he presumed he was out of earshot of the sleeping champion, he pursed his lips and hummed idly a ghost of a thing he remembered from their ever-drifting ancient love. 

“ _ When you find the one you might become, _

_ Remember that part of me is you. _ ” 

He stopped in the shadow of the rusted Ladder, squinting against the grit in the wind. 

“ ** _Remember _ ** _ that part of me is you. _ ” 

~

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> { you find a red rose in the morning light;  
you wait the night, and find it gone. } 
> 
> -Lyle Lovett


End file.
